Darwin's Next

While America's chewiest clusters of wingnutty goodness are loudly aiming their non-science nonsense at the "debate" over global warming, out in the states, the people who have a problem with Charles Darwin are still tossing the bone up in the air and wondering why it comes down.

First, Missouri.

The bill proposed by Republican State Rep. Rick Brattin had its first public hearing Thursday. Brattin has described teaching only evolution in school as "indoctrination" to local TV.

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And whatta guy is Senator Brattin.

It's a par for the course kind of controversy for the bill's sponsor. With Missouri facing court challenges over the procurement of drugs used in executions, Brattin submitted House Bill 1470, last month, which would allow the Department of Corrections to execute condemned prisoners by firing squad. "If the judgment of death is to be carried out by firing squad, the director of the department of corrections shall select a five-person firing squad consisting of licensed peace officers," it reads.

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Meanwhile, in the home office of American sedition, they're doubling down on the stupid.

The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee met Monday to review and approve the new set of science standards that the Department of Education will begin implementing by the fall of 2014 for students. Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, argued against teaching natural selection as fact, when he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn."Natural selection is a direct reference to Darwinism," Fair said after the meeting. "And the implication of Darwinism. is that it is start to finish." Fair argued South Carolina's students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy. "To teach that natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong," Fair said. "I don't have a problem with teaching theories. I don't think it should be taught as fact."

"I talk to them regularly, but their views aren't like mine," Fair says. While Discovery has advocated for the teaching of intelligent design, the idea that order in the universe implies an intelligent Creator, Fair adheres to a narrower interpretation of the Christian Genesis account. As a young-earth creationist, Fair believes that the universe is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old.

Fair eventually withdrew his objections, so young South Carolinians -- for now, anyway -- will move along through their secondary schools without having a theocratic deadweight tied to their ankles.But we have allowed ourselves only two major political parties, and one of them is committing itself root and branch to the dissemination of deliberate ignorance. Democracy cannot sustain itself this way.